Pumpkin Pie, the Thanksgiving Dessert We Take for Granted

If you grow up in London, there's no better exotic delicacy than pumpkin pie.

If you want to buy Fruit Roll-Ups or Kraft Mac & Cheese in London, there’s only one place to go. Or at least, there was only one place to go that I knew when I was growing up there in the ‘90s and early ‘00s—a small specialty shop called Partridge's. My American mother would bring me and my sister to the store as a treat and buy us hard-to-find American specialties. We’d be the envy of our classrooms, sharing weird sweets that no one had ever seen before, and inviting our friends to come over to our apartment and leave with lurid orange grins painted with Kraft’s “cheese.”

Each year, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, these rare items from the other side of the ocean were in high demand in our household. We’d go to Partridge’s and stock up on Stove Top stuffing, Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce, and Libby’s canned pumpkin. My mother would be working on a menu in early November, and an astoundingly meticulous and rigorous schedule by which she would cook. Things like homemade cranberry sauce (we had both types) and gravy (also two types) would be done a couple of days in advance. Turkey would be ready to go in the oven at daybreak. Potatoes were boiling in the morning.

The thing I was responsible for was the simplest: mixing the pumpkin pie filling, using Libby’s pumpkin, and mixing in evaporated milk, spices, and the ungodly amount of sugar that makes it taste so good. I’d stir them together like an amateur chemist, mix some eggs in, and pour it into a pie crust of my mother’s making (I didn’t really do that much). In about an hour, we’d see if a knife came out clean, and I’d sit at the kitchen table, obsessively watching the pie as it cooled. It was a homemade delicacy that I had a part in, and was, as a result, my favorite part of the meal.

When I moved to America to go to university, things changed. Soon after I left home, my parents separated and left London, and our English Thanksgiving was lost as a tradition. It would be absurd to fly back to London to celebrate an American holiday by myself, so I planned to stay with a friend in the States.

But, in early October, I was surprised to see a familiar pie in a shop in New York City. The Hungarian Pastry Shop on 111th Street and Amsterdam Avenue had a slice of pumpkin pie in their display case. It’s not an exaggeration to say I was shocked—I literally didn’t know that the kind of pie I made as a child was baked anywhere other than in people’s homes, or that businesses would sell pumpkin pie by the slice. I’d simply never seen it outside of our house in England before.

Since that discovery, whenever I saw it for sale, I ate it with a passion. Dessert? Pumpkin pie. Small snack? Pumpkin pie. Any hunger whatsoever? Pumpkin pie. It’s amazing how much pumpkin pie you can eat if you put your mind to it, and really love pumpkin pie. I’ve since been calmed down, and only eat a usual quantity—a handful of pumpkin pies per year.

Last Thanksgiving my mother stayed in New York and prepared an amazing meal, as usual, and I volunteered to mix the pumpkin pie. It wasn’t hard to find the ingredients here, but I did manage to confuse a tablespoon with a teaspoon. It still tasted good.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.